Chapter 19

Atlantic Crossing

'REVIEW OF AVAILABLE INFO REGARDING OVERSEAS ACTIVITIES CHURCH OF
SCIENTOLOGY REVEALS ONLY THAT ITS FOUNDER L. RON HUBBARD IS ECCENTRIC
MILLIONAIRE WHO HAS BEEN EXPELLED FROM RESIDENCE IN SEVERAL COUNTRIES BECAUSE
OF HIS ODD ACTIVITIES AND BEHAVIOUR. HE IS OWNER OF SEVERAL SHIPS WHOSE
APPEARANCE IN PORTS IN VARIOUS PARTS OF WORLD HAVE STIMULATED QUERIES
. . . FROM OTHER GOVERNMENTS ASKING INFO RE VESSELS MISSION AND
CREW. RESPONSES INDICATE WE KNOW VERY LITTLE . . .'
(Outgoing signal from CIA headquarters, Langley, Virginia, 16 October 1975)

* * * * *

Hubbard did not join the exodus on the Lisbon-bound ferry from Tangier; he
was driven from Villa Laura to the airport, where there was a direct flight
leaving for Lisbon that afternoon. Sea Org personnel were waiting to meeting
him in the Portuguese capital and they hurried him through the airport to a
waiting car which headed downtown to the Lisbon Sheraton. The Commodore then
sat fretting in his hotel suite for several hours while lawyers in Paris,
Lisbon and New York assessed the risk of his extradition to face fraud charges
in France. Ordinarily, he would have avoided such legal imbroglio by sailing
away from it in his flagship, but the Apollo was in dry dock and thus
provided no sanctuary.

With Hubbard in the hotel were Ken Urquhart, Jim Dincalci and Paul Preston,
a former Green Beret recently appointed as the Commodore's bodyguard. Urquhart
said that Hubbard was 'fairly relaxed' and gave them a little briefing on the
need to maintain 'safe spaces'.[1] Dincalci
disagreed: 'He was very nervous and afraid of what might happen. I could see
he was shredding. After two or three hours there was a telephone call from the
port Captain. When he put the phone down he said, "This is really serious.
I've got to get out of here now".'[2]

Urquhart was sent out to book seats on the first available flight to the
United States and collect some cash. It was agreed that Preston would travel
with Hubbard and Dincalci would 'shadow' them so that

he could inform the ship immediately if there were any problems. The loyal
Urquhart returned with three Lisbon-Chicago tickets on a flight leaving early
next morning. Although he had booked them through to Chicago, the flight
stopped in New York and he suggested they got off there in case there was a
'welcoming party' waiting at Chicago's O'Hare airport. He also had a briefcase
stuffed with banknotes in different currencies - escudos, marks, francs,
pounds, dollars and Moroccan dirhams, about $100,000 in total; it was the best
he could do, he told Ron.

The flight left next morning after only a short delay, with Dincalci
sitting several rows away from Hubbard and Preston. At J.F. Kennedy airport
in New York, Dincalci stood behind them in the Customs queue and looked on in
horror as a Customs officer told Hubbard to open his briefcase. Having looked
inside he promptly invited Hubbard to step into an interview room.

'As they took him away I thought, oh God, that's it, now everyone will know
L. Ron Hubbard is back in America,' said Dincalci. 'He came out about fifteen
minutes later looking like a zombie. He'd had to give them a lot of
information about the money. He got into a taxi outside and I said, "Where are
we going?" He said, "I can't think." He was literally in shock. We drove into
Manhattan and he pointed to a hotel, it was a Howard Johnson's or something
like that, and said, "We'll stay there."'

The three of them checked in using false names: Hubbard was Lawrence
Harris, Preston was Don Shannon and Dincalci was Frank Morris. Dincalci then
went across the street to a deli and bought lunch. Back in the hotel, he asked
the Commodore if he should return to the ship, but Hubbard did not seem to
understand the question. Next day, he sent Dincalci out to buy clothes for all
of them and to look for a place to live; the question of Dincalci returning to
the ship was never mentioned again.

Dincalci soon found a suitable apartment in Queens, in a fifteen-storey
building with its own heated swimming-pool called 'The Executive'. It was in
a safe, upper middle-class residential area close to Forest Hills and
convenient for the subway. For the first few weeks, Hubbard did nothing but
watch television all day long, switching from channel to channel, absorbed by
everything from soap operas to rock music shows.

The America to which Hubbard had returned after an absence of nearly a
decade had changed beyond his recognition, particularly when viewed through a
colour television screen. It was a country obsessed with the unfolding
revelations of Watergate, haunted by a war incomprehensibly lost in Vietnam
and beset by crises, not least in confidence. The Commodore of the Sea Org
knew little of the black

crisis, the urban crisis, the drugs crisis, the energy crisis or any of the
events that were branded into the American conscience by place names such as
Kent State, Attica and Chappaquiddick.

While Preston stayed in the apartment to look after Hubbard, Dincalci went
out every day to the United Nations building to research international
extradition laws. A few days before Christmas 1972, he returned to the
apartment and told Ron he was in the clear; he had established beyond doubt
that the United States would not extradite its own citizens. Hubbard began
making plans to travel, to visit the org in Los Angeles. He even thought about
throwing a party, but within a couple of days a message arrived from the
Guardian's Office in California telling him he was still not safe and to stay
undercover. It was a cheerless Christmas.

The Guardian's Office was the conduit for communications with the Commodore
and the strictest security prevailed to prevent his whereabouts being
discovered. Preston picked up and delivered the mail every other day at a post
office box in New Jersey. Everything was in code and no personal mail of any
kind was forwarded. Telephone calls were similarly coded, using the page
numbers of the American Heritage Dictionary - 345/16 was the sixteenth
word from the top on page 345. Preston would go to a payphone well away from
the apartment, call the Guardian's Office in Los Angeles and reel off the
numbers. If there was an incoming message he used a small tape machine to
record it and transcribed it when he got back to the apartment.

When they were out and about in New York, both Dincalci and Preston went to
inordinate lengths to ensure they were not being tailed, frequently
back-tracking and crossing from an uptown to a downtown train. Travelling on
the subway, they would choose a stop at random, hold open the doors as they
were beginning to close and leap out at the last moment.

Inside the apartment, a routine was soon established. Dincalci got up early
and went out to do the day's food shopping and buy the paperback books that
the Commodore read voraciously. 'I soon got to know what he liked,' said
Dincalci. 'It was all blood and thunder escapist stuff. I'd choose them by the
cover - the more lurid the cover, the more he liked them.' Hubbard woke at
about ten or eleven o'clock; the television was turned on immediately and
stayed on for the remainder of the day, even if he was reading or writing.

While Dincalci was out running errands for the Commodore, Preston stayed in
the apartment to prepare breakfast and lunch. Dincalci cooked dinner when he
got back in the evening. For the first two months it was always fishsticks,
breaded chicken, steaks or hamburgers, until Hubbard tired of the diet and
encouraged Dincalci to try other dishes.

After dinner Hubbard had a single tot of brandy and sometimes talked into
the night. 'He'd jump around from subject to subject,' said Dincalci. 'One
minute he'd be talking about how an angel had given him this sector of the
universe to look after and next minute he'd be talking about the camera he
wanted me to buy for him next day. I used to watch him talking; sometimes his
eyes would roll up into his head for a couple of minutes and he'd be kinda
gone. One of the things that upset him was that he'd never gotten back the
money that he had stashed away in previous lives. There was some inside the
statue of a horse in Italy which he had hidden in the sixteenth century. He
was a writer and had written The Prince. "That son-of-a-bitch
Machiavelli stole it from me," he said. He talked a lot about his childhood
and all the horses he had ridden when he was little, how he would get on them
before he could walk. I didn't get the impression that it was a happy
childhood, not at all. There was a lot of bitterness there about his parents.
He said, over and over, he had graduated from George Washington University.
"They say I didn't," he used to complain, "but I did." He said that he was
editor of the University paper for four years and that would prove it.

'He said that when Pearl Harbor was bombed he was on some island in the
Pacific and he was the senior person in charge because everyone else had been
killed. He was controlling all the traffic through the island until a bomb
exploded right by him at the airport and he was sent home, the first US
casualty of World War Two. He had a big fatty tumour, a lymphoma, on the top
of his head which he said had slivers of shrapnel in it. We had it X-rayed
once and had the film enlarged fifty times to find the shrapnel, but there was
nothing there. When he came back from the war his first wife didn't go to see
him, even though he was wounded. He had nothing good to say about her. His
second wife, whom he never really married, was a spy who had been sent by the
Nazis to spy on him during the war.

'Most nights I'd give him a massage before he went to bed and he always
said he felt better for it. In my mind I never questioned anything he said
except once when he was talking about out-of-the-body experiences and how
beautiful it was to sit on a cloud. I was always running about New York
looking at things for him and I thought if he was such hot shit, why did I
have to go and look? Why couldn't he go out of his body and take a look
himself?'

In February, Hubbard began to get jittery about the security in the
Executive building and Dincalci was asked to look for somewhere with a 'lower
profile'. He found a large apartment in a scruffier neighbourhood of Queens -
a nondescript second-floor walk-up in the middle of a block on Codwise Place -
owned by a Cuban family who lived on the first floor of the house. Dincalci
paid three months' rent in advance, in

cash, and said his brother and his uncle would be moving in immediately.

Most official photographs of Hubbard published by the Church of
Scientology show him in the golden days of the Apollo voyages or
earlier. This one, taken from a 1973 television documentary, shows the
'Commodore' to be deteriorating rapidly. (From Lamont, Religion Inc.,
1986)

Soon after the move, Hubbard decided to go out for a walk. Dincalci was
concerned that the preparations the Commodore was making to pass unnoticed in
the street would almost certainly mark him out for attention. 'His hair had
grown very long, almost down to his shoulders and he looked pretty unkempt. He
insisted on wearing this big hat with the brim turned up. It made him look
like Bozo the clown. If he had walked into any org they would have kicked him
out.' After being cosseted by central heating for three months, Hubbard
stepped out into a freezing February day, immediately got a chill in his tooth
and attracted a retinue of jeering street kids. It discouraged him from
venturing out again by himself.

His aching teeth appeared to trigger other complaints and Dincalci was
driven to distraction trying to nurse an intractable and irritable elderly
patient who was at first reluctant to consult either doctor or dentist. When
one of Hubbard's rotten teeth dropped out, Dincalci painstakingly ground all
his food. Eventually Hubbard agreed to seek professional medical help. On
visits to a chiropractor in Greenwich Village he always wore a wig as a
disguise and on one occasion Dincalci and Preston took the be-wigged Commodore
to a local Chinese restaurant for his favourite dish, egg foo yong. It was
their only social outing.

On the recommendation of an allergist, Hubbard began a regular course of
injections, administered by Dincalci, which seemed to help him. As his health
improved, he started taking more interest in the affairs of the Church of
Scientology, even writing bulletins with some of his old enthusiasm. 'He wrote
tremendously fast by hand,' said Dincalci. 'It was like automatic writing you
get in the occult. He'd have a glazed look, as if he was kinda gone, his eyes
would roll up and the corners of his mouth would turn down and he'd start this
frenzied writing. I've never seen anyone write so fast.'

Now sixty-two, Hubbard was also beginning to ponder his place in posterity.
The Church of Scientology had been swift to make use of the recently enacted
Freedom of Information Act, which had revealed that government agencies held a
daunting amount of material about Scientology and its founder in their files,
much of it less than flattering. Hubbard, who had never been fettered by
convention or strict observance of the law, conceived a simple, but
startlingly audacious, plan to improve his own image and that of his church
for the benefit of future generations of Scientologists. All that needed to be
done, he decided, was to infiltrate the agencies concerned, steal the relevant
files and either destroy or launder any damaging information they contained.
To a man who had founded both a church and a

private navy this was a perfectly feasible scheme. The operation was given
the code name Snow White - two words that would figure ever more prominently
over the next few months in the communications between the Guardian's Office
in Los Angeles and the Commodore's hiding place in Queens, New York.

In September 1973, Hubbard got word from the Guardian's Office that the
threat of extradition had diminished and it was safe for him to return to the
ship and, coincidentally, to his wife and children. He left next day, with
Paul Preston, on a Boeing 747 bound for Lisbon, leaving Dincalci behind to
pack up all their belongings and close the apartment at Codwise Place.

No one on the ship knew where Hubbard had been for the previous ten months,
nor that he was returning, but his arrival back on board was predictably cause
for celebration.

'When he came back on board he looked better than I had ever seen him
look,' said Hana Eltringham. 'He was bright and bouncy, busting out all over.
He had lost weight and could hardly contain his happiness at being
back.'[3]

If there was an emotional reunion with Mary Sue and the children, it was
not widely observed. Instead, Hubbard gathered the crew on A deck to explain
that he had been away touring the orgs in the United States, raising quite a
laugh when he said that he had walked into some of them without being
recognized. Preston, sitting at the back of the room, knew it was a lie but
obviously said noticing; he had once driven Hubbard past the New York org but
all the Commodore had said was that he thought it needed a bigger sign.

While Hubbard had been away, his accommodation on the Apollo had
been extended and improved and his research room had been totally encased in
lead, insulated from contact with the hull, to make it sound-proof. A working
party had spent three months crawling through the ventilation shafts and
scrubbing them with toothbrushes in order that he would no longer be troubled
by his well-known allergy to dust. In the previous few weeks the ship had been
cleaned from stem to stern and every deck subjected to a 'white glove
inspection'. Any ledge or fiat surface that produced a smudge on the fingers
of a white cotton glove resulted in the entire area being cleaned again.

The Commodore soon had the ship on the move and there were many light
hearts on board when the Apollo weighed anchor and set sail, after
almost a year in dock in Lisbon. She headed north along the Atlantic coast of
the Iberian peninsula, stopping for a few days at the historic cities of
Oporto and Corunna, then turning south again to Setubal and Cadiz. At the
beginning of December, she returned to Tenerife in the Canary Islands, one of
her regular ports of call before the Lisbon re-fit.

Hubbard wanted to spend some time ashore in Tenerife taking photographs,
and his cars and motor-cycles were unloaded on to the dock. He had at his
disposal a big black Ford station wagon, a 1962 yellow Pontiac Bonneville
convertible and a Land Rover, but as often as not he chose to make his forays
ashore astride his monstrous Harley Davidson, on which no doubt he cut a
particular dash.

One afternoon, snaking round the switchback curves up in the volcanic
mountains of Tenerife, Hubbard skidded on a patch of loose gravel, lost
control and fell off, smashing several cameras that were on straps round his
neck. Although in considerable pain, he managed to get back on the bike and
ride it down to the port. He let it drop on the quayside and staggered up the
gangway of the Apollo with his trousers torn and the mangled cameras
still around his neck. Jim Dincalci, back on board as medical officer, was
summoned immediately. Only too well aware that he was not qualified to deal
with broken bones or possible internal injuries, he suggested that the
Commodore should be taken to a hospital for a check-up. Hubbard refused
adamantly, but huffily agreed to be examined by a local doctor. He prescribed
rest and pain-killers, to be taken two at a time as required.

After the doctor had left the ship, Dincalci, who still clung to the
remnants of a conviction that an operating thetan had no need for anything as
mundane as a pain-killer, offered the Commodore a single pill and a glass of
water.

'Why only one?' Hubbard snapped, his eyes bulging with anger. Dincalci
hastily produced a second pill, but Hubbard's temper gave way. He leapt up
from his chair and began pacing the room in a fury, shouting unintelligible
abuse at the fools in his midst who cared nothing for the fact that he was
dying. Suddenly he turned on Dincalci. 'It's you,' he roared.
'You're trying to kill me.'

Dincalci was shattered by the accusation. 'I felt I had rapport with him, I
felt like a son to him. It was like having my father say I was trying to kill
him. No, it was worse. Here was the man who was trying to save the universe
saying I was trying to kill him. I was crushed. I felt I had lost everything;
what little self-esteem I had was gone in that moment.'

Dincalci very quickly found himself chipping paint and the ticklish task of
nursing the Commodore was handed over to Kima Douglas, a strikingly attractive
artist from South Africa who had had two years' nursing experience in the
labour ward of the British hospital in Bulawayo. 'I think he had broken an arm
and several ribs,' she said. 'He certainly had massive black bruises
everywhere. We strapped up his arm and strapped his ribs, but he couldn't lie
down so he slept in a chair as best he could. He must have been in agony. He
screamed and hollered and yelled. It was absolutely ungodly; six weeks of pure
hell.

'He was revolting to be with - a sick, crotchety, pissed-off old man,
extremely antagonistic to everything and everyone. His wife was often in tears
and he'd scream at her at the top of his lungs, "Get out of here!" Nothing was
right. He'd throw his food across the room with his good arm; I'd often see
plates splat against the bulkhead. When things got really bad, I'd go and make
him English scrambled eggs, well salted and peppered, and toast and butter and
take it up to him. I even fed him once.

'He absolutely refused to see another doctor. He said they were all fools
and would only make him worse. The truth was that he was terrified of doctors
and that's why everyone had to be put through such
hell.'[4]

She could not help but recall how he had changed in the months since she
first joined the ship. 'My expectation of L. Ron Hubbard was that he would be
a psychic person who could look at me and see every evil thing I had ever done
in my whole life. I was still searching for something, although I didn't know
what, and the thought of someone being able to look into my head both
terrified and excited me. I'd been indoctrinated with all the things he could
do. There were wild stories that if an atomic bomb was about to go off in
Nevada, Ron could defuse it with the power of his mind. At that time everyone
was talking about atomic warfare and I truly believed he had come to save the
planet. As I walked up the gangway to the ship, he stepped out of his office
wearing a white uniform and his Commodore's hat with two messengers close
behind him. I was introduced to him and he shook my hand and was very
charming. He seemed to be a jovial, happy, golden man. I felt I had arrived.'

Kima called on her unlovable patient every two days, but the burden of
day-to-day care fell on the messengers. 'Before the motor-cycle accident he
was a very nice, friendly person,' said Jill Goodman [who was thirteen years
old when she became a messenger]. 'Afterwards, he was a complete pain in the
ass. It was like having a sick, crotchety grandfather. You never knew what he
was going to be like when you went in there.'[5]

'He didn't get out of that red velvet chair for three months,' said Doreen
Smith. 'He'd sleep for about forty-five minutes at a time, then be awake for
hours, screaming and shouting. It was impossible to get him comfortable. None
of us got any sleep. I was better with a cushion, someone else was better with
a footstool, someone else with cotton padding, so every time he woke up we all
had to be in there, fussing around him while he was screaming at us that we
were all "stupid fucking shitheads" . . . he was out of control and
even the toughies were in tears at times. The red chair to us became a symbol
of the worst a human being can be - all we wanted to do was chop it up in
little pieces and throw it overboard.'[6]

ascribing sinister motives to every mishap and imagined slight, he issued
an edict that would introduce another Orwellian feature to life on board the
Apollo. Convinced that his orders were not being carried out with
sufficient diligence, he established a new disciplinary unit called the Rehabilitation
Project Force. Anyone found to have a CI (a 'counter-intention' to his
orders or wishes) was to be assigned to the RPF, along with all trouble-makers
and back-sliders. 'I was shocked when I heard about it,' said Hana
Eltringham. 'To me it was like setting up a penal colony within our midst.'

Since it was only necessary to incur the Commodore's disfavour to be
assigned to the RPF, its numbers swelled rapidly. RPF inmates wore black
boiler suits, were segregated from the rest of the crew and slept in an
unventilated cargo hold on filthy mattresses that were due to be thrown out
before the Commodore decided they would be suitable for his new unit. Seven
hours' sleep were permitted, but there was no leisure time during the day and
discipline was harsh. Meal breaks were brief and the RPF was obliged to eat
whatever food was left from the crew meal.

'Things took a real downhill turn around that time,' said Gerry Armstrong,
who was then the ship's port captain. 'He became much more paranoid and
belligerent. He was convinced there were evil people on board with hidden evil
intentions and he wanted to get them all in the RPF. The RPF was used as an
incredible daily threat over everyone. If he could smell something cooking
from the vents, whoever was the current vents engineer would be assigned to
the RPF. If the cook burned his food - RPF. If a messenger complained about
someone - RPF.

'His actions definitely became more bizarre after the motor-cycle
accident. You could hear him throughout the ship screaming, shouting, ranting
and raving day after day. He was always claiming that the cooks were trying to
poison him and he began to smell odours everywhere. His clothes had to be
washed in pure water thirteen times, using thirteen different buckets of clean
water to rinse a shirt so he wouldn't smell detergent on it.

'At that time no one would have dared to think that the emperor had no
clothes. He controlled our thoughts to such an extent that you couldn't think
of leaving without thinking there was something wrong with
you.'[7]

To the relief of the entire crew, the Commodore was more or less recovered
from his accident by the time of his sixty-third birthday in March 1974 and
the ship resumed its aimless wandering, this time on a triangular course
between Portugal, Madeira and the Canaries. But a subtle and bizarre change
had taken place in the pecking order on board: after the Commodore and his
wife, the most powerful people

on the ship were now little girls dressed in hot pants and halter tops -
the new uniform of the Commodore's faithful band of messengers.

While Hubbard had been suffering so vociferously, the messengers had
assumed many extra little tasks on his behalf. They washed and combed his
hair, helped him dress and undress, massaged his back, mixed his special
night-time vitamin drink and smeared on his fleshy features the cream he
mistakenly believed kept him looking youthful. When he recovered, the
messengers continued with these duties and constantly competed with each other
to find further little ways of pleasing the Commodore.

The ritual of his ablutions, as devised by the messengers, set the tone for
Hubbard's increasingly baroque lifestyle. 'At first I was surprised at all the
things we had to do,' said Tanya Burden, who had joined the ship in Madeira as
a trainee messenger at the age of fourteen. 'But then I thought this man has
studied for fifty years to help the world and has done so much for mankind,
why should he have to do anything for himself?

When he woke up he would yell "Messenger" and two of us would go into his
room straight away. He would usually be lying in his bunk in his underwear
with one arm outstretched, waiting for us to pull him up to a sitting
position. While one of us put a robe round his shoulders, the other one would
give him a cigarette, a Kool non-filter, light it and stand ready with an
ashtray. I would run into the bathroom to make sure his toothbrush, soap and
razor were all laid out in a set fashion and I prepared his bath, checked the
shampoo, towel and the temperature of the water.

'When he went into the bathroom we would lay out his clothes, powder his
socks and shoes and fold everything ready to get him dressed. Everything had
to be right because if it wasn't he would yell at us and we didn't want to
upset him. The last thing we wanted to do was upset him. When he came out of
the shower, he would be in his underwear. Two of us held his pants off the
floor as he stepped into them. He didn't like his trouser legs to touch the
floor, God forbid that should happen. We pulled up his pants and buckled his
belt, although he zipped them. We put on his shirt, buttoned it up, put his
Kools in his shirt pocket, tied his cravat and combed his hair. All this time
he'd be standing there watching us run around him. Then we'd follow him out on
to the deck carrying anything he might need - cloak, hat, binoculars, ashtray,
spare cigarettes, anything he could possibly think of wanting. We felt
it was an honor and a privilege to do anything for
him.'[8]

The messengers were all potential high school cheerleaders in appearance -
pretty blondes with even white teeth and red lips, pert little breasts
straining against knotted halter tops, bare midriffs, tight hot pants, long
tanned legs, bobbysox and platform-soled sandals.

They had devised the uniform themselves, with the Commodore's approval, and
it gave them maximum opportunity to flaunt their pubescent assets to
advantage.

While male members of the crew competed avidly to deflower the messengers,
Hubbard himself never once exhibited any sexual interest in them. 'He never
tried anything with me,' said Tanya, 'and as far as I know he never did with
any of the other girls. He didn't sleep with Mary Sue; we thought perhaps he
was impotent. I think he got his thrills by just having us around.'

'I once asked him why he chose young girls as messengers,' said Doreen
Smith. 'He said it was an idea he had picked up from Nazi Germany. He said
Hitler was a madman, but nevertheless a genius in his own right and the Nazi
Youth was one of the smartest ideas he ever had. With young people you had a
blank slate and you could write anything you wanted on it and it would be your
writing. That was his idea, to take young people and mould them into little
Hubbards. He said he had girls because women were more loyal than men.'

The more the messengers did for the Commodore, the more he came to think of
them as the only members of the crew he could trust. At nights, when they
were undressing him and going through the elaborate business of getting him
ready for bed, he liked to talk to them, sharing confidences and telling them
about his adventures. They would sit on the carpet at the end of his bed
listening to his stories, wide-eyed, for hours. The special status they
enjoyed did nothing for their characters. 'We became', Jill Goodman admitted,
'poisonous little wenches. We had power and we were untouchable.' It was not
in the least unusual for a fourteen-year-old messenger to march up to a senior
executive on the ship and scream: 'You fucking asshole, you're going to the
RPF. That'll teach you to fuck up.' It was unthinkable to answer back; it
would have been like answering back to Hubbard.

'A sort of "Lord of the Flies syndrome" began working with the
messengers,' said Rebecca Goldstein, who had been recruited into Scientology
by her brother, Amos Jessup. 'They were so drunk with their own power that
they became extremely vengeful, nasty and dishonest. They were a very
exclusive, dangerous little group.'

In May 1974, Hubbard did a very curious thing which perhaps indicated that
he was losing his facility to distinguish, even in his own mind, between fact
and fiction: he applied to the US Navy for the war medals he had always
claimed he had been awarded but knew he had never won.

On 28 May, the ship's liaison office in New York wrote to the Navy
Department enclosing an authorization from Hubbard to obtain his medals and
asking for them to be forwarded as soon as possible. The

letter provided some helpful background data on Mr Hubbard, quoted from one
of his spurious 'official' biographies: 'He served in the South Pacific and in
1942 was relieved by fifteen officers of rank and was rushed home to take part
in the 1942 battle against German submarines as Commanding Officer of a
Corvette serving in the North Atlantic. In 1943 he was made Commodore of
corvette squadrons and in 1944 he worked with amphibious forces.' There
followed a list of seventeen medals awarded to Mr Hubbard, including the
Purple Heart and the Navy Commendation Medal, many of them with bronze stars.

On 18 June, the Navy Department replied, enclosing the four routine medals
awarded to former Lieutenant Lafayette R. Hubbard, US Naval Reserve, and
noting, 'The records in this Bureau fail to establish Mr Hubbard's entitlement
to the other medals and awards listed in your
request.'[9]

The Commodore apparently had no difficulty circumventing this little
problem: he quickly put into circulation an eight-by-ten colour photograph of
twenty-one medals and palms he had won during the war. Some were missing, he
explained to the crew. He had actually won twenty-eight medals, but the
remainder were awarded to him in secret because naval command were embarrassed
that he had sunk a couple of subs in their own 'back yard'.

In the summer, the Commodore turned his attention from his own image to
that of his ship. He was taken with an idea to improve the Apollo's
public relations by staging free concerts and dance performances for the local
residents at her regular ports of call. After hours of watching television in
Queens, he considered himself an expert on popular music and modern dance and
believed he had made important 'discoveries' about the nature of rock music
and the need for a strong heavy beat. He often demonstrated his theories to a
mystified Jim Dincalci. On the ship, he was able to put his ideas into
practice with his own band, the 'Apollo Stars', made up of volunteers from the
crew chosen at auditions conducted by the Commodore with all the confidence
and aplomb of a man who had spent a lifetime in show business.

Ken Urquhart, who probably knew more about music than anyone on board,
resolutely refused to become involved. 'My favourite composer was Mozart, not
the horrible, raucous noise they were making. They practiced on the deck most
afternoons, playing music made up by LRH with a very primitive, animal
beat. There was no way I was going to go near them.' Mike Goldstein, who had
played drums in a semi-professional group while he was at university,
volunteered to play with the Apollo Stars in order to get out of the RPF. 'LRH
had said anyone in the RPF who was accepted for the

band or the dance troupe would be let out. I volunteered because I thought
anything was better than running around in a black boiler suit. I was
wrong. The band was terrible, awful; it was the most embarrassing thing I have
ever done.'

Hubbard's idea was that the Apollo Stars would be playing on the aft well
deck each time the ship entered a harbour and that bookings for both the band
and dance troupe would be arranged in advance at every port of call. Since he
would be making appearances himself, he had a new uniform designed with a
suitably theatrical flair. It featured a powder blue kepi with a lavishly
gold-braided peak and a cloak in the same hue, lined with scarlet silk. He
looked, Urquhart reported, 'most peculiar'.

Quentin Hubbard, now twenty, began rehearsing with the dance troupe and
enjoyed it so much he made the mistake of telling his father he would like to
be a dancer. 'Oh no you wouldn't,' Hubbard replied. 'I have other plans for
you.' There was no further discussion and Quentin was no longer allowed to
perform. Not long afterwards, he made a feeble attempt at suicide while the
ship was docked at Funchal in Madeira.

'He'd gone missing ashore for a while,' said his friend Doreen Smith, 'and
while people were out looking for him he just walked back on board. I went to
see him in his cabin to make sure he was OK and found him lying on his bunk.
He smiled at me and I said, "Hi, how are you feeling?" He said, "Not so good,
my stomach's real upset." Then he said, "Doreen, I've done the most awful
thing. I've taken a whole lot of pills." I said, "Oh shit. Get out of the bunk
and don't go to sleep." I began walking him around the cabin and said, "You
know I'm going to have to tell your Dad, don't you?" He nodded and said, "I
know. He'll know what to do."'

Doreen ran to the Commodore's cabin and said 'Quentin's taken some pills.'
Hubbard did not need it spelled out. He told Doreen to fetch some mustard from
the galley and mixed it into a drink which he made Quentin gulp down. The boy
vomited repeatedly and was taken to the sick bay to recover. His father sent
down a message that as soon Quentin was well enough to leave the sick bay, he
was to be assigned to the RPF. Mary Sue, who had a reputation for protecting
her children against the excesses of the ship's regime, was powerless to
intervene. She was supposed to be responsible for welfare on board - indeed,
she had won a special dispensation from the Commodore to allow married couples
in the RPF to spend one night together a week - but knew her husband was in a
towering rage over Quentin and there was nothing she could do.

Rebecca Goldstein was among the inmates of the RPF when Quentin
arrived. 'It was real tough for him,' she said. 'He was very

delicate and refined, not at all self-important, very unlike his father. He
had hardly any facial or body hair and it was very hard to say whether he had
started shaving. There were rumours that he'd attempted suicide before. He
cringed from his father, he was completely overwhelmed by him.'

The valiant attempts of the Apollo Stars and its associated dance troupe to
win the hearts and minds of the Spanish and the Portuguese people did not meet
with overwhelming success, although the political climate did not help. There
had been a military coup in Portugal earlier in the year and the subsequent
unease tended to make the Portuguese nervous of mysterious foreign ships
calling at its ports for no apparent reason. The Apollo had also
managed to upset the Spaniards by mistakenly attempting to enter a major naval
base at El Firol.

The ship's real problem, however, was that its 'shore story' was wearing
thin. Portuguese and Spanish port authorities were still being told that the
Apollo was owned by a highly successful business consultancy firm, but
all they could see was an old, rust-streaked ship, often festooned with ragged
laundry and crewed by young people in tattered, ill-assorted uniforms. It was
little wonder that suspicions mounted about its activities and rumours took
hold that the ship was operated by the CIA.

Jim Dincalci, who had been put ashore to run a port office in Funchal,
Madeira, became alarmed by the rumours. 'It seemed to be common knowledge in
Madeira that the ship was not what it was supposed to be and most people
seemed to think it was a CIA spy ship. I had made friends on the island and
had contacts in local Communist cells. The word was that the Communists were
out to get the ship next time she arrived in Madeira. I sent telexes to LRH
warning him what was happening and advising him not come to Madeira until
things had calmed down. I was absolutely shocked to see the ship come into the
harbor.'

The Apollo arrived in Funchal on 7 October and moored in her usual
berth. Emissaries were sent ashore to advertize a 'rock festival' to be held
at the weekend, featuring the Apollo Stars. Late on the afternoon of
Wednesday, 9 October, while Mary Sue and several members of the crew were
ashore, a small crowd of young men began to gather on the quayside. By the way
they were glowering and gesticulating at the ship, it was obvious to those on
board that this was not a social call. Soon the crowd, which was growing all
the time, began chanting 'C-I-A, C-I-A, C-I-A.'

Nervous Scientologists lining the rails of the ship tried chanting 'CIA'
back at the crowd, but it did nothing to lower the tension. Then

the first stone clanged against the Apollo's hull and a bottle
smashed on the fore deck. More stones and bottles followed as the crowd's
anger spread. The crew scattered to take shelter and began picking up the
stones from the deck and throwing them back into the crowd. In a matter of
moments it became a pitched battle.

Hubbard, who was watching what was going on from the bridge, got out a
bullhorn and boomed 'Communista, Communista' at the crowd. Then he began
taking photographs of the stone-throwers with a flash unit, further inflaming
their tempers. Several of the crew were hit by flying stones, including Kima
Douglas, whose jaw was broken by a large lump of rock that hit her full in the
face. On the quayside, one of the crowd opened his trousers, waggled his penis
and took a direct hit with a well-aimed stone from the ship.

With stones and sticks and bottles flying in all directions, there was
total confusion on board the Apollo. Some crew members would later
describe the Commodore as being perfectly cool through the whole incident,
others said he appeared to be terrified. Whatever his state, no one was
taking charge and everyone was screaming orders. In one part of the ship
someone was trying to get together a party to repel boarders; in another, the
sea hoses were being run out and trained on the crowd in an attempt to
persuade them to disperse.

Any remaining vestige of control among the rabble-rousers vanished when the
ship turned its hoses on them. On the quayside there were several motor-cycles
belonging to members of the crew and two of the ship's cars - a Mini and a
Fiat. All the motor-cycles were hurled into the harbour, then both cars were
pushed over the edge of the quay, hitting the water with an enormous splash
and quickly disappearing under the surface. Meanwhile, others in the crowd
slipped the Apollo's mooring-lines from the bollards and she began to
drift away from the quayside.

At this point, the Portuguese authorities belatedly appeared on the scene
to restore order. Armed militia were put on board to provide protection, a
pilot assisted with anchoring the ship in the harbour and a launch rescued
those members of the crew who had been stranded ashore, including Mary
Sue. The police demanded the film that Hubbard had been taking during the riot
and the Commodore, mighty pleased with himself, dutifully handed over two
rolls of unexposed film from cameras he had not been using. It was nightfall
before the decks had been cleared of the broken glass and rubble.

Since it rather appeared as if the people of Madeira were no longer
interested in a rock concert featuring the Apollo Stars, the ship sailed next
day, leaving information with the harbour authorities in Funchal that she was
heading for the Cape Verde Islands, 1500 miles to the south. She departed on a
purposeful southerly course until she was

out of sight. She then turned west, equally purposefully, prompting the
crew to speculate with mounting excitement that the Commodore had decided to
return to the United States.

For the next six days, in glorious weather, the Apollo sailed due
west across a glassy ocean, followed by sporting dolphins and whales. On 16
October, she put into St George, on the northern tip of Bermuda, to re-fuel
and Hubbard announced to the crew that their next port of call would be
Charleston, South Carolina. There was an enormous cheer at this news: many of
the crew were US citizens and some of them had not been home for years.

Eight miles off Charleston, a coded radio message from the Guardian's
Office warned the Commodore that the FBI were waiting on the dock to meet the
ship. Hubbard's instinct was to go ashore and brazen it out; Mary Sue was
terrified at the prospect and convinced that her husband would be immediately
arrested. A furious argument followed. 'Everyone could hear them screaming at
each other for about two hours,' said Hana Eltringham. 'She was adamant that
we should not go ashore. She said he would be indicted ten or fifteen times
and it would be the end of him and she wasn't going have it.'

For once, Mary Sue won. Hubbard called his senior aides together on the
promenade deck and said there was to be a change of plans. He was going send
a signal to Charleston to say that the ship was heading north to pick up spare
parts in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Then they were going to sail south, to the
Caribbean.

The Apollo docked at Freeport in the Bahamas two days later, while
FBI agents waited patiently in Halifax, Nova Scotia. It did not take them long
to find out what had happened, however, and the ship was doggedly tracked as
she meandered from island to island around the Caribbean for the next twelve
months. If no one in Washington could make out what L. Ron Hubbard was up to,
it was hardly surprising, because L. Ron Hubbard did not know himself.

It seemed the Commodore was simply enjoying a Caribbean respite while he
decided on his next move. He had a set of tropical uniforms made for himself
in white silk and the messengers were also kitted out in tight white uniforms,
with mirrored sunglasses - an innovation suggested by the Commodore which gave
them an appropriately sinister appearance. At most ports of call, the Apollo
Stars trundled ashore to perform for apathetic audiences with nothing better
to do than sit in the sun at a free concert and wonder where the musicians had
come from. The Commodore took up photography again and attempted to ingratiate
himself with local politicians by offering to take their portraits. He
photographed the Prime Minister and members of the opposition in
Curaçao and spent some time at a convent taking pictures of nuns. He
was very pleased with the result and sent a

framed enlargement, and a cheque for $1000, to the convent to thank the
nuns for their co-operation.

He could well afford it, as Kima Douglas knew better than anyone. 'While we
were in the Bahamas, a story came out that the Swiss were going to change the
tax laws in some way that would affect the money we held there. The old man
went crazy. I heard him screaming and yelling and ran upstairs to find what
was wrong. He was pacing up and down and shouting at the top of his voice, "Do
you know what they're doing? Everything's gone. Gone! Gone! We're going to
lose everything."' When he had calmed down a little, Kima suggested that
perhaps the money should be moved. Three hours later, she was on a plane to
Zurich, with two other Scientologists, carrying handwritten instructions from
Hubbard authorizing the transfer of all his assets to a bank in Liechtenstein.

When they arrived, they were taken down into the vault of the bank and
shown the money. Kima Douglas, who thought she could no longer be surprised by
anything in Scientology, was awestruck. 'Everyone's eyes widened. There was a
stack, about four feet high and three feet wide, of dollars, marks and Swiss
francs in high-denomination notes. I couldn't begin to guess how much was
there, but it was certainly more than the three of us could carry.'

It took nearly two weeks to make arrangements to move the cash to a bank in
Liechtenstein and then the serial numbers - the first and last note of each
bundle - had to be noted. When the mission returned to the Bahamas, Kima had
to describe to the Commodore the exact size of the various piles of money. 'He
was very pleased,' she said. 'He thought he'd outdone the Swiss.'

Hubbard's mood, as always, remained mercurial and very much subject to his
notorious phobias. He discovered that the unfortunate Hana Eltringham
possessed a particularly acute sense of smell and employed her as a 'sniffer
dog' to root out the source of the smells that plagued him. 'Whenever he
complained of bad smells,' she said, 'I would be called out of my office by a
messenger to go to his quarters and crawl around on my hands and knees to try
and locate where the smell was coming from. I would trace it to one corner,
then we would rip off the wall cladding and very often find something like
mildew.'

It was in the interests of every member of the crew to bend over backwards
to keep the Commodore sweet, none more so than Kathy Cariotaki, head of the
ship's 'household unit', a position which, because of its proximity to the
Commodore, almost guaranteed an extended assignment in the RPF. But Kathy had
won considerable praise for extracting an apology of sorts from the Greek
government after the Corfu debâcle and she used her innate diplomatic
skills to good advantage while running the 'household unit'.

'If a cycle started up when he began claiming things tasted funny, you had
to be ready to handle it. If a dish didn't taste right, he'd start hollering
and yelling that we were starving him and everyone would be under the gun. My
solution was to have two back-up meals prepared at dinner every night so that
there was always something else to put in front of him quickly.

'Mary Sue was a diet addict, she was always trying this diet or that
diet. One day she sent orders down to the galley about what she wanted to eat
that evening according to her latest diet. When the meal was served I'd
usually listen to see if there was going to be an upset, but this night
everything seemed fine so I went into my office. Then a messenger came round
and said the Commodore wanted to see me on A Deck lounge. By the time I got
there he was hollering at the top of his lungs. I couldn't understand what in
the world he was saying until he brought it down several decibels and shouted
that the cooks were starving Mary Sue. He'd given her his dinner and I saw
that she was shovelling it down like it was the end of the world. She gave me
a look which said, "Don't open your mouth."

'Their relationship was very strange. I got them to celebrate their wedding
anniversary, organized a special dinner with candles and made sure she had a
present for him and he had one for her. Mary Sue was close to the children,
but he wasn't - he hardly ever saw them. Diana was married by then and ate
with her husband, while the younger children ate with the crew. I initiated
Sunday dinners for the whole family and took every opportunity to get them
together at birthdays and anniversaries, otherwise they hardly ever saw each
other.'[10]

Hubbard directs a 'photo-shoot' in Curaçao, 1974. Later, he
would progress to making movies in California.

When the Commodore went ashore on photo-shoots, Kathy Cariotaki acted as his
driver and always checked the route the day before. In Kingston, Jamaica,
Hubbard decided he wanted to take some pictures in the slum areas. At his
insistence, Kathy had hired an old Pontiac convertible which was bright red
and inevitably attracted attention, much of it overtly hostile. Hubbard,
sitting on the back of the car, seemed oblivious to the atmosphere and
continued shooting pictures while a group of black youths jeered and
cat-called at the 'whiteys'. At one point a boy on a bicycle rode up behind
the car and made a loud whooping noise; Hubbard turned round and whooped back
so fiercely that the boy fell off his bicycle. Kathy sensed that the Commodore
did not appreciate the danger, but back on the ship he banged on Mary Sue's
door and said, 'Guess what, honey? I almost caused a riot this afternoon.'

In St Vincent, in the spring of 1975, the ship was prepared to receive a
surprise visitor from Bremerton, Washington - the Commodore's father. Harry
Ross Hubbard was eighty-eight years old and

_______________10. Interview with Kathy Cariotaki, San Diego, July 1986

very frail, but determined to make peace with his estranged son. The old
gentlemen arrived on the quayside in a taxi and the Commodore went down the
gangway to meet him - the first time anyone had ever seen him leave the ship
to welcome a visitor.

The crew had been ordered to conceal all evidence of Scientology from the
Commodore's father, but he was too old and confused to care about such things.
He sat talking with his son for hours and wandered amiably about the ship
evincing very little curiosity about what was going on. With a plentiful
supply of beer and a couple of fishing trips, he was content. When he got back
home to Bremerton, he told Marnie, his sister-in-law, that he had had 'a
wonderful trip'.[11] He died a few months later.

The Apollo had not been in the Caribbean for long before she again
began to arouse suspicions at her various ports of call. She cruised from the
Bahamas to the West Indies to the Leeward and Windward Islands, the
Netherlands Antilles and back again and rumours of illicit or clandestine
activity followed her as tenaciously as the seagulls. In Trinidad, a weekly
tabloid newspaper speculated that the ship was connected to the CIA and
suggested that the crew was somehow linked with the horrific Sharon Tate
murders in Los Angeles. As the American Embassy drily cabled to Washington:
'The controversial yacht Apollo seems to have worn out its welcome in
Trinidad'.[12]

To those on board ship, it was obvious that a conspiracy was at work. The
Captain, Bill Robertson, explained that Secretary of State Henry Kissinger,
who was 'one of the top SMERSH guys', had been bringing
pressure to bear and threatening to cut foreign aid to any island that
welcomed the Apollo.[13] It made perfect
sense to a Scientologist.

Courses were still being held on the ship for senior Scientologists and in
June 1975, one of the new students was Pam Kemp, Hubbard's old friend from
Saint Hill days. She was shocked to see how much he had aged. 'I saw this
figure coming on board in a big hat and red-lined Navy Cloak and I thought if
I'm not mistaken that's LRH, although he was very slow and old looking. I went
up to him and said, "Hi, Ron." He looked through me like he didn't know who I
was. I thought maybe he was a little deaf so I went around another way and as
he was coming towards me I said, "Hi, Ron. How are you?" He didn't recognize
me, didn't know who I was. I thought, how weird. Later I discovered he
probably didn't see me properly because he needed glasses, but would never
wear them.'[14]

Not long afterwards, Hubbard suffered a minor stroke while the ship was in
harbour in Curaçao. He was rushed to the local hospital, kept in
intensive care for two days and then transferred to a private

room, where he stayed for three weeks, with messengers on duty day and
night outside his door. 'To keep him in the hospital,' said Kima Douglas, 'we
had to bring food from the ship. He wouldn't touch the hospital food, so we
ferried every meal out in hot and cold boxes, ten miles each way.' When he had
recovered sufficiently to leave hospital, he moved into a cabana bungalow in
the grounds of the Curaçao Hilton to convalesce.

While he was there, he despatched an aide, Mark Schecter, to the United
States on a top secret mission. Schecter carried a suitcase full of money. His
orders were to hand it over to another Scientologist, Frankie Freedman, who
had found a motel for rent in Daytona Beach, Florida.

Although only a handful of people were aware of it, the Sea Org's seafaring
days were over.